


Reflections

by Bibliotecaria_D



Series: After the End [6]
Category: Transformers Generation One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 19:02:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliotecaria_D/pseuds/Bibliotecaria_D
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life keeps going after the Apocalypse. Vortex doesn’t want to die, even when he should.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> Smoke and mirrors, and glimpses of reality in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reflections

**Script Title:** Reflections  
 **Warning to Audience:** Angst?  
 **Show Rating:** G  
 **Continuity Stage:** G1, _After the End_ AU   
**Characters:** Vortex, Hoist, Blades  
 **Theatre Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn’t own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.  
 **Acting Motivation (Prompt):** _“Alter-ego”_

[* * * * *]  
 **Smoke and mirrors, and glimpses of reality in between.**   
[* * * * *]

The Autobots were gentler than he’d expected. Then again, he hadn’t had many expectations to begin with, so he didn’t know why the lack of pain felt off. The hand on his chest, the touches on his shoulder, the lack of a knock or two about the helm; none of it sat right with him, although he couldn’t say why. It could have been nostalgia for the Constructicons, perhaps, although he didn’t remember them with anything approaching fondness. He recalled their professional callousness numbly, just as he viewed the small Autobot pulling on his arm with a dull sort of apathy.

The gentleness was wrong, but not wrong enough to make him do more than notice it. He thought about it, then let it slip away. It wasn’t important.

“Vortex, are you listening? Vortex, I need you to sit here. Good. Right there. Can you stay there?”

The little mech pulling him around sure talked a lot. That was okay. Not really, but he didn’t have any reason to stop the Autobot, so it was okay by default. He had even less reason to not go where the hand on his arm took him. It was just easier to follow, just as it was easier to tolerate the talking than make the mech shut up. Since he wasn’t paying attention to the chatter anyway, the background noise just blended into a vaguely annoying white noise that let him know time had passed. He didn’t know how much time, but time. 

Vortex found that he tended to…drift. Sometimes there was noise. Sometimes there were hands pushing on his shoulders, pushing him down into a seat, and a klik later he wondered if he’d imagined it, except that he was sitting down. The noise swept in and out again, niggling at the edge of his consciousness but never biting in. It passed over him, and it went away. 

He didn’t know how much time had passed, but eventually the lone Combaticon realized he was staring across a room. A not-room type of room. It looked like someone’s interior. This was the inside of a spacefaring mech, probably, if the Autobots were taking him away from Soundwave and his mauled Cassetticon. Since he hadn’t been executed, that seemed to be the only other solution. Vortex was being banished to a different colony, and right now he was in transit. The transformation seams meant he was onboard someone. Someone whose interior he was looking across.

Not the interior of -- not who he’d been thinking of. Whoever that had been, but the blank spots in his memory took away the person’s name before he could remember it beyond a rusty ache under the smooth plain his mind had become. Smooth and featureless, without a single ripple of emotion to catch his intermittent observations or bring up anything significant for him to remember. It just stretched from one side of his mind to the other, like his head had become a two-dimensional image someone slowly wrote his thoughts out onto. He read them, blinked, and they were erased away.

There was someone sitting across from him, red and white and sad all over. That struck him as odd, because he didn’t seem like the type who should be sad. Angry, maybe. Angry seemed like a better emotional fit, and the faintest urge to provoke barely broke the surface before it went back down. A ripple or two uneasily stirred his mind, but they smoothed back out as if they’d never been. The red and white mech didn’t react. He sat there across from him, and Vortex continued to stare at him because there was nothing else to do and little enough cause to look away. 

Shadows he idly recognized as Autobots stood and moved about the spacecraft, coming between them numerous times, but it was so hard to focus on them. His thoughts traced out slowly on the smooth surface, never sinking in and unable to keep up with their quick motions. His head gradually turned, following someone who’d strode by kliks ago, and a tiny ripple of confusion sloshed across his mind when he couldn’t see who he’d been…had he been looking for someone? Who? His head turned, just as slow, to look across the room through the shadows, but there was no one there.

The shadows writhed and squirmed, opaque and transparent in turns like dense smoke, or images processed long after the source moved on. They talked and talked, but he only sometimes listened to what they said. 

“ -- rtex? Come on, chap, up and at ‘em! Time to stand up. Let go of the seat. Sky Lynx needs it. Vortex, stand up. There. Now, this way, please. One step at a time, old boy.”

The pull came again, long and persistent enough that he went with it because the other options seemed too troublesome, and the spacefarer’s interior went away. Or Vortex left it. Either way, he came to be outside, but it wasn’t an outside he wanted to be outside in. He should have done something…else. Whatever else he could have done, that he hadn’t. Oh, well. Too late now. 

The light harshly blinded him until he stumbled, and the chatter picked up. 

“ -- not turning down his optical sensors. Vortex, you have to look away from the sun. Vortex, follow my hand. Can you see my hand?”

A shadow waved against the light, blooming rings of darkness around its periphery. It was so _fast_. Vortex numbly watched it, thoughts finally catching up and identifying that it was a hand. He lost it when it disappeared in a trail of dim moving shade-shapes, only for it to return. The shadows wavered until his thoughts labeled it a hand again, and he watched it because he had no reason not to. It moved downward, slow and steady, and he tracked it absently. After a while, he noticed that the blinding glare had stopped. That was nice. He hadn’t liked not being able to see. 

At least, as much as he liked or didn’t like anything. Opinions scrawled across the smooth surface of his mind, sank in, and left not a trace behind. He thought that should bother him, but the tail end of the thought finished as the beginning erased away, and he no longer remembered what he’d been thinking a moment later. 

He didn’t see where the hand he’d followed had gone, but there were a lot of shadows about, and soon he forgot about it. One particular shadow kept getting in his way, pushing and pulling and directing him. He went where it seemed to want him to go, mostly because resisting wasn’t worth the effort. Resisting it. An Autobot. He thought so, anyway, maybe, but he kept losing sight of the mech who talked and talked. The mech vanished, and there was just a determined shadow that sometimes repeated words he understood. But then the shadow was an Autobot, until the movement outpaced Vortex’s short, slow thoughts. The words became white noise again, and the shadow flitted away.

“ -- ttle response. His systems are all online, but, well, this is a bit of a fix. Not sure what I can do for the poor fellow besides make him comfortable. From what Soundwave said, they’ve already tried everything I’ve got on hand.”

Shadows weren’t supposed to always _move_ like this, were they? The constant movement made him somewhat dizzy. He didn’t mind. It was okay. Not really, but since he didn’t care to try and stop the shadows, it was okay enough. 

“ --ar me? Vortex? Lay down, please. No?”

After a while, Vortex started to wonder if he should have responded to the last round of push/pulls. Or had it been the last round? There might have been more afterward. He hadn’t resisted, but it hadn’t seemed worth responding to, either. He didn’t remember. 

After even longer, he realized he was in a room again. This time, it didn’t look like somebody’s interior. Not -- anyone he knew, if he knew anyone. This was just a room. With repair berths, so the thought meandered across his blank mind that he’d been sent back to Soundwave, but no. There were other patients here. Red, and white, and blue patients. Autobot patients, and the colony on Eo-36-Niner didn’t had many Autobots. Decepticons, some Neutrals, but the Autobots had mostly moved on to Earth. It wasn’t that the Decepticons were very warlike anymore, but peace was easier if the two factions just stayed separate. 

Old grudges died hard, even in the face of total annihilation. He’d fought beside Autobots in the Quint Wars, but he hadn’t wanted to live with them afterward. Vortex didn’t mind these Autobots, however. Unlike the shadows that burred noise and blurred movement, they lay still. So very still. It was oddly restful. Oddly hypnotic, too. The longer he looked at them, the less he noticed the distracting shadows.

If he were as still as they were, maybe the shadows would stop for a while. He thought their dim trails of shade-shapes and sharp black rings might leave him alone. He wasn’t precisely tired, but the interruptions weren’t restful. It was okay, but only because he couldn’t make himself care enough otherwise. If he could sink down, stop thinking, then everything would just go away. The shadows and the white noise would go away, and it would all be okay. Really okay, not just tolerable.

A perfect spike of alarm broke the surface of Vortex’s smooth center, and for a second, peaceful rest was the _last_ thing he wanted. 

For that second, the still forms on the berths were Protectobots, the room was an isolation ward, and the shadow in front of him was an Autobot medic. The little green one, what’s-his-face, the one Vortex had always wanted to interrogate because he knew all the nitty-gritty everyday details of every Autobots’ body inside and out --

“ -- ex. Vortex.”

His visor lit a brilliant red, and the Combaticon’s head jerked back. “I -- !” 

The second ended. The spike faltered and subsided.

The Autobot flickered, like an after-image of a photograph, and the shadow murmured its white noise again.

When Vortex’s processor wandered around to it again, the room was free of shadows. There were only mechs of blue and red and white, lying very still, who were easy to watch. So he did, looking at them because moving took thought, and thought was far too difficult to attempt right now. He didn’t think about why they were lying there, or who they reminded him of. The colors were all wrong, anyway. Maybe. He didn’t remember, actually.

There was another shape, sitting like his mirror-image across the motionless room. Mirror-image, but not the same. Vortex had never been red, white, or sad. The rotor blades were different, too. The same, but different. Opposites with strange similarities and familiar differences: a mouth instead of a face mask, a red emblem instead of a purple one, blue optics instead of a red visor.

When those optics looked up, they actually _saw_ him. Saw him and recognized him, which was more than his mirror-image could do in return. 

“At least they’re not dead,” Blades whispered. 

Vortex only gazed loosely in his direction, because it was true. Everything about them was the same, but different.


End file.
